Meet Nish Kumar - Ed Fringe 2015

My name is Nish Kumar - my show is about politics, diversity and the American Pie film franchise.

Latitude 2015: comedy round-up - day 2

An 11am Saturday morning crowd is possibly the hardest to please, that's all saying you can tempt them out of bed in the first place, so it is surprising to see a more than healthy crowd of both children and adults first thing in The Comedy Tent. Nicole Evans offers a round-up on the first half of the day's comedic proceedings. Featuring Nish Kumar, Funz and Gamez, Rob Beckett, Ivo Graham and Rob Delaney.

The art of the comedy fringe poster

Last year, Holly Walsh posed with an upside-down cigarette, this year Nish Kumar is going retro ... what makes for a good comedy poster? And does a comic's offering actually draw audiences to their Edinburgh show?

Interview: Nish Kumar

'Why am I stressed about something so fundamentally useless?'

Edinburgh preview: Nish Kumar

Nish Kumar is making a name for himself. Not just as a smart, stand-up comedian but as someone who comes up with titles that get his shows talked about.

Formerly one half of Gentlemen of Leisure alongside Nish Kumar, Neenan has set himself up as a long-form comedy storyteller, with his gripping 2014 about a mysteriously haunted house a masterclass in narrative absurdity. This year Neenan takes on the sci-fi genre with an all new story concerning the discovery of alien technology.

Radio Times review

If you like Russell Howard but are a little tired of his Good News shtick then it's good news (if you'll excuse the repetition) for you, as this new series sees him return to more traditional stand-up which is where he really shines. Highlights from his set include an unexpected greeting from an old lady and an oddly intense masseuse - not to mention pointing out the fundamental lack of logic in being a racist football supporter.

There are a couple of tweaks to the stand-up format, though, which include Howard answering questions from the audience that range from tame to extremely odd and ultimately result in one toe-curlingly funny moment when the Bristolian comedian inadvertently insults an audience member to almost instant regret.

Here he's joined by Nish Kumar and Sara Pascoe - the latter of whom gets great comedic mileage out of a recent appearance on QI. We'll never look at Stephen Fry's face in quite the same way again...

Nish Kumar interview

The fantastic Nish Kumar brought his completely brilliant 2014 show, Rumination on the Nature of Subjectivity to Manchester last week. We caught up with him before his stint at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival, previewing his new show Long Word... Long Word... Blah Blah Blah... I'm So Clever.

Review: Ed Gamble, Group Therapy, Manchester

An endlessly charismatic Ed Gamble headlined April's Group Therapy, with Eric Lampert and MC Nish Kumar providing excellent support.

As a younger show with an "open door" submissions policy - meaning that anyone can send in material for consideration - the topical sketch series Newsjack (Radio 4 Extra, Thursday) ought to be edgier, weirder, less formulaic than The News Quiz; but ends up, somehow, being just as complacent. Currently fronted by the comedian Nish Kumar, with assistance from a revolving cast of comics and actors, it's one of a small group of original, non-archival series on 4 Extra.

This week's half-hour instalment was dispiriting in the way that only really unfunny comedy can be. A skit about a plane that had been forced to land at Heathrow because of a broken lavatory careered out of the radio and landed with a tin clunk on the floor. The nadir was reached during a skit about politicians doing drugs, in which Nicola Sturgeon was represented by someone doing a generic Scottish accent, David Cameron by someone who sounded vaguely like Ed Miliband, Ed Miliband by someone who sounded like a young Janet Street-Porter, and Nigel Farage by a woman making no attempt to do an accent at all.

Why does BBC radio so consistently fudge this kind of thing? Neither series is doing anything that pushes a boundary, finds an edge, or ventures anywhere outside of an ideological comfort zone. Chris Morris's On the Hour, commissioned by Radio 4 nearly 25 years ago, retains more bite in a single sketch than they managed across an hour of broadcast time. Here's hoping it doesn't take another quarter-century for the BBC to try something different.